about the chelsea galleries–
The Chelsea neighborhood is one that I frequented during high school because it was home to my best friend, who lived on 23rd street, between 6th and 7th avenue. Chelsea has everything, from famous restaurants and clubs, to gyms and homes for the visually impaired. It is always swarming with multitudes of people, natives and tourists alike, but I never before frequented the neighborhood for one of its main attributes—the numerous art galleries that are stacked back to back right by the West Side highway.
Art galleries have always seemed kind of cold and nonsensical to me. Four or five expensive paintings hung up by mostly obscure artists in plots of land that are worth thousands of dollars in rent a month always seemed kind of if it was a waste of space. I popped into five different galleries—’Judge’, by Vincent Katz and Wayne Gonzales; ‘The Omen’, by Christian Lemmerz, ‘Fiddleback’, by Stephen Bush; ‘Chunk’, by Paul Henry Ramirez; ‘folks’, by Michael Cline; and ‘Shallow’ by Pierre Bismuth, Stefan Bruggenmann, Martin Creed, Maclcolm McLaren, and Miltos Manetas.
Of those exhibits, three of them left lasting impressions on me. I was picky about which galleries I wanted to walk into, so the first one I walked into, ‘Chunk’, was based purely on whether I found the paintings appealing at first glance. I was drawn to the vibrant colors and bold layers Ramirez used in his paintings. They were full of triangles, circles, and lines intersecting with one another. There was something so intense about the proportions and colors of the paintings that I was struck and almost couldn’t look at them. I usually don’t find geometric paintings like this appealing when I’m in a modern art museum, so I was surprised to see how much I liked these paintings.
The second gallery that stuck with me was ‘Judge’. I arbitrarily walked into the exhibit because it was a colorful room, which made it stand out from the other galleries, where the walls are predominantly white. However, the artists were obviously trying to make political statements because instead of actual pieces of art, statistics about oil and the white house were presented in nonsensical, grammatically incorrect ways were stenciled all over the wall. I didn’t really buy into anything they were saying because the messages were rather convoluted and I lost a lot of the meaning in that process. If that was the point of the artists, then I wasn’t really impressed by it.
The third gallery that left a lasting impression me was ‘folks’. The gallery was full of paintings of dead nudes lying in gutters other gritty street scenes. Unlike ‘Judge’, ‘folks’ was full of political, anti-war messages, but it was presented in a way that presented more significance to me because I could see the ugliness and suffering of the people in the paintings, as opposed to just reading a meaningless array of words.
Going into these galleries was an interesting experience for me because it was almost like walking into a museum, which I never realized. There are so many things to do in Chelsea, but I never really understood that I was able to just walk several avenues west and go take a look in galleries full of art by people who aren’t necessarily famous or will be. It somehow helped to make me feel less isolated from art.
September 25th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
I agree with you on the “Chunk” exhibit. I, too, was astounded by how Ramirez juxtaposes circles, triangles and other geometric shapes. The vibrant colors seemed important, too, as they supplemented the designs. There was something primitive yet profound about the exhibit that drew me to it.
September 26th, 2007 at 6:52 am
After reading your post, I now regret not exploring other galleries and exhibits; I stayed on a single street and only visited some of the exhibits over there. The gallery entitled “Chunk” sounds the most appealing, and I would have loved to have seen Ramirez’s bold and vibrant paintings.
In regards to the exhibit entitled “Judge,” although I had not visited it myself, it sounds as if the artists intentionally tried to overwhelm the viewer with the statistics and political statements, as if to pass commentary on how in today’s society, the population is constantly being bombarded with mixed political messages that at the end of the day do not even accomplish what their purposes of clarifying and persuading; they instead confuse and overwhelm the individual with a flood of nonsense.